# Overview

A more traditional JRPG where time is a resource. Every 10 seconds worth of battle time applies a new curse, which is a permanent modifier on all future combats. Think fast and use your time wisely.

Kiri did the writing as well as the art for this one so it comes off with a fantasticly dark and gritty mood, rather than the more whimsical stuff I tend to write.

# Design

Combat for hartblood went through a few iterations before landing in its final position, but this left it a bit cryptic, especially if you don’t read the blurb on the LD page explaining things.

Essentially, we chose “time” as the replacement for mana, stamina, etc. You have infinite time, but every 10 seconds worth, we add a random debuff to one of your characters. It’s a bit of a gamble, and makes routing and risk/reward a bit tricky.

Returning to the hotel entrance will remove all curses, so you have an out, but if you stacked up too many curses deep in the map, getting back there could be tricky. We used random encounters here, so there’s a lot of RNG to consider when making the decision to go deeper or head back to reset.

During the final balancing pass, a lot of the curses got heavily nerfed so people could actually clear the game. This took a lot of the edge off, which was probably right for LD rating specifically, but net negative for the game itself. If I were to revisit this, I’d tune them back up and encourage more careful play, which better matches the mood and pacing.

# Tech

I wrote my own Tiled map parser for this one. There are a few specific rotations that were tricky to replicate in TileGroup, and it took a bit of time to hammer this out. But honestly… I have no idea why I did this for a game jam. It would have been a lot easier to use one of the many off the shelf solutions for this.

These days I have my own map editor in Cerastes, which is significantly worse than Tiled, so that’s cool I guess.

# Play

The current web build can be found here.